Claims of 'hobbit' species face fresh scientific skepticism / New report says small skull found on island probably from modern human with disorder

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Photo: RICHARD LEWIS

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Professor Chris Stringer, Head of Human Origins at London's Natural History Museum, moves a cast taken from the a skull of what is said to be a new species in the evolution of man named 'Homo Floresiensis' during a news conference Wednesday Oct. 27, 2004. At right is a cast of Homo Sapiens skull. (AP Photo/Richard Lewis) less

Professor Chris Stringer, Head of Human Origins at London's Natural History Museum, moves a cast taken from the a skull of what is said to be a new species in the evolution of man named 'Homo Floresiensis' ... more

Photo: RICHARD LEWIS

Claims of 'hobbit' species face fresh scientific skepticism / New report says small skull found on island probably from modern human with disorder

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When scientists announced the discovery of a single tiny fossil skull and a few other ancient bones on an Indonesian island called Flores two years ago, they created a worldwide sensation with their claim that the bones represented an entirely new species of miniature pre-humans never seen on Earth before.

The anthropologists maintained that the little people -- quickly dubbed "hobbits" by other scientists -- lived on the island from about 95,000 years ago until they became extinct about 13,000 years ago.

Skepticism about their claim never ebbed, and today, in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of Indonesian, Australian and American scientists who have examined the fossils are detailing fresh arguments against the evolutionary importance of the hobbits.

The leader of the team is Teuku Jacob, a senior paleontologist at the Gadjah Mada University Medical School in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and one of his principal colleagues is the same scientist who helped conduct the first excavations at the Flores site, R.P. Soejono of Indonesia's National Archaeological Research Center.

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In the original report published in the journal Nature on Oct. 28, 2004, the hobbit discoverers named their small creatures Homo floresiensis after the island where the fossils and a small trove of stone tools were dug from a cave named Liang Bua.

The Australian and Indonesian team said the pre-human people were barely more than 3 feet tall and had heads as small as chimpanzees. Their stone tools were remarkably sophisticated, and they hunted pygmy elephants for their food.

The creatures' lives, the scientists said, must have followed the period when earlier ancestral creatures known as Homo erectus were spreading from Africa into Europe and Asia a million years ago and coincided with the emergence of Homo sapiens -- modern humans -- about 100,000 years ago.

But other anthropologists insisted at the time that the hobbit skull and a lower jaw found at the site showed no evidence they were part of the evolutionary human lineage at all, but were simply the remains of a very small Homo sapiens person deformed by microcephaly -- a rare disorder, often genetic, where infants are born with abnormally small head sizes, receding foreheads and chins, and deformed jaws.

In the report published today, the team led by Jacob reinforces those doubters, saying the Flores skull merely represents a modern human with microcephaly, and the short stature as indicated by fossil leg bones found in the cave places the little people within the range of an existing tribe of pygmies who live right now in the Flores island village of Rampasasa.

Although the fossil skull and the bones are badly preserved and rotted in many places, Jacob and his team claim that 140 features in the hobbit's brain case are within the normal range of the skulls of today's aboriginal people who live throughout the region of Indonesia and Australia. The teeth, too, are similar to those of modern people in the region, they said.

The stone tools, they said in their report, are very similar to those made by Homo sapiens, and could not represent a different, more primitive species of pre-human.

Evolution specialists have long held that a major key to the emergence of new species of organisms -- whether they be plants or any animals, including humans -- is isolation for extremely long time periods.

But the island of Flores, the Jacob team noted, was not nearly so isolated during the years the hobbits were supposed to have lived there. The seas around Flores were shallow; there is good evidence of at least two episodes where different species of miniature elephants reached the island, and humans could well have migrated there many times too, the anthropologists said.

David W. Frayer of the University of Kansas, one of the other authors of the Jacob team's report, created split photographs of the two sides of the only Flores skull among the fossils. The face, he said, exceeded "clinical norms," a strong signal that the individual was deformed, and probably by microcephaly, he said.

The new report, said Richard Klein, a noted Stanford anthropologist and specialist in human evolution who was not a member of the Jacob team, "makes a pretty strong case" that the little people of Flores -- whatever they might have been -- were by no means a new species of pre-humans. "If there isn't at least a second skull that's been properly excavated," he said, "the whole topic will remain controversial."

But the original team of scientists who discovered the bones isn't giving up.

In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, Professor Mike Morwood, an archaeologist at Australia's University of New England and a member of the discovery team, said the "microblades" of the stone tools in the Liang Bua cave are very different from any made by modern humans and "strongly indicate cultural and genetic continuity" during the period when Homo floresiensis lived on Flores.

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